From Stress to Depress
Relaxation is not created by conditions. It is the conditions that obscure the natural relaxation. Conditions are the mental portions we allow ourselves in how we imagine our possibilities in time and space. These move way beyond the grounded physical possibilities, and into areas of feeling and thought. Our sense perceptions, emotions and feelings and our thoughts are the areas where we create restrictions on the relaxation which is always here.
Out of habit or conditioning from society or our family home, we create old boxes and live within them. These boxes are a degree removed from life, as they are based on a historic condition of time and space. They are carried with us from the past, rather than being attuned to the needs to the present. These awkward, uncomfortable boxes of time and space create stress. Disharmony, discord, misplaced rhythm, and incompatibility with the flow of form around us generates a resistance to life. This resistance is stress.
This stress a deep suffering of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It gives a daunting base note of feeling eternally not OK. Not good enough. Not worthy. This births an agenda to get good enough, or at least to seem good enough to others, which brings more stress. Pretending to be good enough, or being seen as good enough by others, can be very stressful when beneath that we are sure that we are pretending. Our stressful sense of secret condemnation can go from bad to inherently evil.
Stress breeds feelings and beliefs of inherent wrongness, fault, not belonging and isolation. It makes us separate. We withdraw not always into spiritual retreat, but instead into a retreat from the oncoming superior forces. A ‘run for your life’ kind of retreat, based on fear. This withdrawal or escapism is based on the physical instincts of fight or flight triggered by the sympathetic nervous system.
Unable to physically run away, or immediately escape, the third fear response can kick in. This is the instinct to freeze. As the survival options of running away or fighting to the death are blocked, and the stress continues, we begin to freeze parts of ourselves.
This freezing appears in the form of depression. The depressed areas of ourselves are where we have closed the Book of Life. In depression, life is frozen, as a last ditch attempt to prevent annihilation. Again, in order to survive, we shut down on life. Again, we find the same paradox of survival based on misconception mentioned at the opening of this chapter.
The areas of pure vitality frozen in depression become invisible first of all to our consciousness. We even use our consciousness to actively exclude them from sight, thus increasing the freeze. We consciously decide to distract ourselves, with a “relaxing” glass of wine, with a program on TV, or by compulsively thinking about something “else”.
Even after we are consciously blinded to these frozen areas, they can remain perceivable in our feeling awareness. They surface as feelings of discomfort, generating dreams that seek relief when we sleep, when the hold of the conscious mind has released.
But as sense and sensitivity decreases in these frozen, detached areas, we can also become increasingly numb in awareness, closing down whole areas of our feeling connection to life. This closure forms a barrier between the inside and the outside worlds. Our friends and relatives become “other” and we, by degrees, become “other” to ourselves. This alienation, isolation and unfathomable sense of loneliness breeds more stress and more depression. We experience ourselves as separate from life.
All the time, from the core of these frozen areas of stress, life is calling our name. It is calling us home.
The healing of depression is found through allowing our awareness to surround the frozen area. It is found in a gradual melting of the frozen energy in the natural heat of our awareness. As we become aware of depression, the life in us reaches out to connect to the life within the depression, and it responds. Not in a moment, not in an hour, but over a period of sentient time the defrosting of frozen life is allowed and the transformation from ice to liquid begins to occur.
- Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 1 – Relax. Don’t Do It
- Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 2 – No Time. No Space
- Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 3 – From Stress to Depress
- Stress, Vitality, Consciousness & The Book of Life. Part 4 – Healing not Dealing
